San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The inspiring Trump era
Turbulent times like the present often bring out the best in movies
Divisive times, unsettling times, contentious times — times when people are checking the news all day and arguing over Thanksgiving dinner — times when people are getting divorces and dropping old friends over politics — have a funny way of producing good movies.
We’re living through one of those times right now. As we approach the season of the Academy Awards, we find that movies are better today than at any point since ... the Vietnam and Watergate era, actually. And before that? Well, movies were pretty amazing in the 1930s, too, particularly during the depths of the Great Depression.
Now to be clear, great movies are produced every year. But in placid times — the
1980s and 1990s, for example — or in times of national consensus, such as
World War II — the masterpieces are brilliant one-offs. They’re not part of a wave or a movement.
But in tough times, the great movies are more of a piece. They don’t necessarily deal with the source of the era’s contention. Sometimes they do, but often they don’t. For example, there were no great Vietnam movies made during the actual war, and yet Vietnam became a presence all the same, an undertone, in masterpieces such as “The Graduate” and “Bonnie and Clyde” and in important cultural markers such as “Easy Rider.”
When artist and audience are thinking about the same thing, and thinking intently, it creates an automatic connection. “Art has always served first as evidence of the soul wrestling with itself,” says Rafael Casal, the co-star and co-author of “Blindspotting,” “so perhaps any surge in art from a society is evidence that we are lost, desperate to be found again, anew.”
Since November 2016, when Donald Trump was elected president, America has been on a journey, and so have the movies. Let’s look at how the movies have reacted to Trump over these past two years.
Phase 1: At first movies were not about Trump, but they seemed to be.
Two things, which seem in contradiction, are true about movies: (1) Because they take so long to write, finance, film and release, movies are usually at least a year behind whatever is going on in the country; (2) Movies have an uncanny way of antic-
ipating the world in which they’re going to be released.
Such was the case for much of 2017. For example, “Get Out,” which turned the “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” concept into a “Stepford Wives”-like horror movie, was released a month after Trump’s inauguration, but it seemed to be a response to the racial climate he brought in with him. This sense of a movie arriving at precisely the right time gave it an aura of importance that it might not have achieved with Hillary Clinton in the White House.
In a similar way, “Wonder Woman” was made with the assumption that Clinton would win the election, and the script even contained an in-joke about a female president. Instead, a film that was intended as a celebration of female arrival gained urgency as an assertion of female power in the face of a perceived common threat.
During this phase, politics had nothing to do with the movies’ inception. But Rachel Rosen, the director of programming for SFFilm, noticed a change in how movies were received. “With ‘Sorry to Bother You’ ” — Boots Riley’s satirical fantasy set in Oakland, in which workers are gene-spliced with animals to make them more efficient — “people saw that it was really creative, original and quirky, but its political message really caught fire because of the world we’re in. It was seen as sending a message.”
Phase 2: The first overtly Trumpinspired movie.
A month after Trump’s inauguration, Steven Spielberg was handed a script about the Washington Post’s legal battle to release the Pentagon Papers in 1971. He dropped everything and went to work, and the result was “The Post,” which was released in time for the 2017 holiday season. At a time when the press was being attacked by the administration as “the enemy of the people,” Spielberg fashioned his film as a celebration not only of the Post but also of American journalism in general, asserting its importance as a check on government power.
Phase 3: Movies made with an awareness of Trump.
For about a year after 9/11, movies set in New York City still began with an establishing shot of the World Trade Center. And then somewhere in late 2002, that stopped, and the movies changed. In a similar way, movies changed in the middle of 2018. They became more serious and began to seem like they and we shared the same world.
The rapturous response to “Black Panther” was more than a response to a good action movie. The film became a vehicle for audiences to celebrate their own values.
“Blindspotting,” one of the best movies of the year, is also a manifestation of a deepening seriousness. It was filmed in June 2017, but it was conceived long before that. “We started this script 10 years ago,” says Rafael Casal. “Many of the themes in the film predate ‘he who shall not be named,’ but our current administration is another symptom of long-standing societal conditions that have gone unaddressed for far too long. Among other things, the film points to
the problem with the normalization of injustice (and) the burden it places on the most vulnerable.”
It’s as if the Trump era had brought about an extra awareness, so that stories that wouldn’t have been made at another time, or wouldn’t have gotten traction, were suddenly finding success. Take, for example, “The Hate U Give,” from a novel by Angie Thomas, adapted by the late screenwriter Audrey Wells. It’s about a 17-year-old girl (Amandla Stenberg), living in a tough black neighborhood, whose childhood friend is killed in an unlawful police shooting.
Spike Lee conceived “BlacKkKlansman” as a subtle Trump rebuke. The film, based on a 1970s memoir in which two detectives collaborate to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan, was already complete when the Charlottesville calamity took place. At that point, the film became less subtle. “I saw what happened, and right away I knew this had to be the coda for the film,” Lee said at the film’s Cannes news conference.
Phase 4: Movies overtly about Trump.
October saw the release of two movies overtly about Donald Trump and his administration. First came the independent film, “Filmmakers Unite (FU),” an anthology film of shorts from a number of filmmakers, chosen and arranged by Jay Rosenblatt and Ellen Bruno. The best of these was Rosenblatt’s own “Scared Very Scared,” which explored the nervous consciousness of the present moment.
“In some ways the title says it all,” says Rosenblatt, who is also director of programming for the Jewish Film Festival. “I wanted to reference things that were happening in the news and also make dire predictions about anti-Semitism and American Naziism — my own fears at the time that have started to come true.”
The second October surprise was “The Oath,” Ike Barinholtz’s powerful comedy, about a Thanksgiving dinner held in the shadow of a right-wing administration’s move to make American citizens swear allegiance to their leader. The movie is extreme, but not exactly far-fetched.
“The thing that hit me most was how quickly a democratic-republic can descend into a protofascist state,” says Barinholtz, who wrote, directed and stars in the film. “I’m not saying it’s happened yet, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that a percentage of the populace seems to be totally fine with authoritarianism. I knew I had to tell my story before I got sent to a gulag.”
The present and future
It must be said that there were many strong movies in 2018 that had absolutely nothing to do with Trump or politics, such as “Green Book,” “Roma,” “The Favourite,” “Can You Ever Forgive Me,” “Wildlife,” “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” “First Reformed,” “A Star Is Born,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “Disobedience,” and the dystopian masterpiece “Vox Lux.” But one could argue — based on the empirical evidence from other, similar eras — that contentious times have a way of upping everyone’s game.
So where is this all heading, and when does it end? The best guess is that it doesn’t end until the country as a whole reaches a general consensus. For example, if President Trump were to be exonerated of all allegations, or conversely, if he were to be impeached and convicted or resign in disgrace; and if from that point on, Americans more or less agreed on a collective narrative about the last few years, then American life can go back to being boring.
Of course, the movies will be there to reinforce the official history, whatever it will be. Maybe Michael Shannon will play a heroic Trump in a movie, or maybe Shannon will star in “The Bob Mueller Story,” directed by Rob Reiner. There will be Academy Awards and slaps on the back all around, until the movies eventually catch up with the times and go back to being boring, too.
Until then, we can all dream of boring. Boring never seemed so good.